SILVANUS

The SILVANUS Project is financed by the European Horizon 2020 Green Deal program and foresees the creation of a platform based on Artificial Intelligence (AI), which responds to the demands of efficient use of forest resources and provides methodologies for monitoring and protecting natural forests against threats of forest fires found worldwide. The SILVANUS platform will operate at 3 levels: a) prevention and preparedness; b) detection and response; c) restoration and adaptation.

The technical and scientific innovation of SILVANUS resides in the development and integration of advanced semantic technologies to arrive at an Integrated Technological and Information Platform for Fire Management, which allows managing contents in a systematic way and which enables a more agile, dynamic and efficient use. simple on the part of the interested parties, who will thus be able to take greater advantage of the knowledge, with less time spent.

To this end, the platform will integrate a large-scale data processing framework capable of analyzing heterogeneous data sources, including natural resources, climate models and meteorological data, multispectral computational images. It will also be complemented with the integration of resilience models, and the results of environmental and ecological studies, carried out using state-of-the-art technologies, for the evaluation of fire risk indicators, as well as for the early detection and coordination of the response to forest fires.

The efficiency of the platform will be demonstrated through 11 pilot demonstrations, across Europe (France, Italy, Romania, Greece, Portugal, Czechia, Croatia, Slovakia) and internationally (Australia, Brazil and Indonesia), and will be based on technical innovations, which may be adopted in other market segments.

Starting in 2021, the SILVANUS Project has 49 partners from 18 EU countries and 3 non-EU countries. The Project also foresees a high involvement of citizens through the development of a scientific program, in order to raise awareness of forest fires and create new strategies for their prevention.

The Portuguese pilot will be led by EDP New, and has the collaboration of partners from AdP VALOR, Instituto Superior Técnico and Terraprima, as well as Águas do Valo do Tejo as a third party. The main objective of this pilot is to demonstrate the implementation of actions to prevent and restore forest fires, which simultaneously benefit nature conservation. To this end, it will combine conventional agricultural practices (such as grazing) with digital technologies to develop and implement approaches to forest management that are close to nature.

Terraprima's role in SILVANUS is to implement a demonstrative action plan at Quinta da França farm, in order to become an operational experimental test site for the portuguese cluster, using interventions with grazing for biomass control and fire prevention, as well as contributing for dissemination activities and serve as an example for replication elsewhere in the region.